English Short Story - The Box

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The Box

-Prologue-

        The box had a strange green glow to it like radioactive waste, and its edges were made of a shiny metallic material that made the whole thing look like a jewel.

        The Labrador dropped the box on the ground, shaking it free from his mouth.

        Max Cromwell looked up. It was early morning, the blades of grass still wet from the dew. The dog had bounded back from a small patch of woodland on a hill that looked across London and the suburbs and beyond. Max took this route with his dog every morning but had never come across anything more interesting than a newspaper.

        He bent down to examine it. It had an alien look. Whoever had scrawled the foreign writing was certainly not human. He had never seen a language flowed like this one did, with no spaces, punctuation or anything, ‘貓是非常小的不喜歡所有的鄰居’.

        Turning to his dog he said, “Follow boy” pointing at the strange box. The dog started trotting toward the patch of woodland. Where the dog stopped there was a small crater.

        Then he remembered the shooting star he watched last night with his friends and put one and one together. This box, whatever it was, came from the sky.

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-Spaceship-

         George was eating lunch with his fellow crew members. ‘Space food…’ he thought as the grey mash came out of the microwave. It wasn’t that it didn’t taste good, it didn’t have any taste. Every day they ate the same cocktail of nutrients, vitamins and minerals. Every Sunday they could add some flavouring to their food. Curry, chicken, lamb or pork. It tasted artificial, like instant soup, but at least it was a change. Life on the spaceship wasn't fun. There was nothing to do. They were travelling to Mars on a mission that would take 2 years there ...

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